If you look at a chart from Google Trends, which measures how often Google users are searching for certain terms, the search term "Pinterest" doesn't really register until about midway through 2011. Then it spikes.

But Pinterest wasn't founded in 2011.

Or 2010.

Or 2009.

Pinterest was started four years ago, right as the recession was really getting underway; in 2008.

It had a different name and a different CEO, then. It had three cofounders. Two of them are no longer around. A third "cofounder" joined just last year.

The truth is just as one source close to a Pinterest investor told us: "Pinterest is an overnight success four years in the making."

Here's that story.

Tote-tal Failure

In August 2008, Paul Sciarra quit his job at New York venture capital firm Radius Capital. Across the continent, his college friend Ben Silbermann quit his gig at Google.

They started a company called Cold Brew Labs. There was a third cofounder, but he was a student still, and he quit the company after a couple weeks to go back to school.

Silbermann is a small, quiet person with a dark complexion and short dark hair. He's skinny. He has the demeanor of an artist.

"He's a very humble guy, and somewhat soft-spoken, but when you take the care to lean in and listen, he's very thoughtful," says one of his investors.

Sciarra is bigger in stature and personality. He can look like Don Draper when he wants to, but he usually doesn't, preferring a "California" look of t-shirt, sneakers, and jeans. There is a "pretty good energy about him."

Sciarra, thanks to his VC connections, was the CEO – the business guy. His job was to raise money. Also, his home in California would be the company's first office, though that is a stretch of the word.

"It was kind of a house," says an early employee. "Paul and his friend Dave lived there, and then we kicked Dave out – and then we kicked Paul out."

An investor remembering that office says, "There was dirt on the floor. There was no place to sit. It was a really dark, dirty – a really tough place."

Silbermann, whose job at Google was using data to improve the company's products, was Cold Brew Labs' product visionary from the start.

His first vision was called Tote, and it was an app for the iPhone. It pulled data from online product catalogs to create a meta catalogue for shoppers on the go. You could find particular products across retailers, sorted by location.

The app was pretty enough, and the idea interesting enough, that Cold Brew Labs found institutional funding in early 2009 from First Mark Capital in New York.

Months after launching, it was clear that Tote wasn't going to work.

"The app was a total failure," says one source close to early employees.

There were two big problems. One was that people weren't using mobile apps for shopping yet. It was too early. The other was that Apple's App Store wasn't ready to support businesses built on the platform. It was still too slow. Cold Brew Labs would submit an app update to the store and then finish the next version before getting feedback on the prior.

Says a source that was around during the company's early days: "Apple had two or three people on the whole team. It was like the DMV."

Still, some people were using the app, and most of them were using it in a particular way: They were sending images of particular products to themselves. Collecting them.

Watching this behavior during the summer of 2009, Silbermann and a very small team of technical employees began working on a product built around this behavior. It would be for the Web, a mature platform.

The pivot from mobile app Tote to the new Web-based product "was a very progressive iteration," not an "epiphany" says a source close to early employees.

"It makes total sense because we got the idea from a shopping app. You don't shop for [particular items] you shop for shoes, you shop for dresses. You shop in buckets, so we were like OK, we need buckets."

The team built a product that allowed users to put images of things in buckets. Silbermann made sure that the image collection product wasn't described as a utility for shopping alone.

A source close to early employees says Silbermann wanted the product's purpose to be vague, so that it could be used by everyone for anything. He learned this lesson from Twitter.

By the end of fall 2009, the new product was almost done. Silbermann had convinced the directors that the new product was the company's future. It wasn't a dramatic choice, says a source close to the board. "It was, let's refine the vision given what we've learned."

Over Thanksgiving dinner, Silbermann's girlfriend thought of a name for it: Pinterest.

Pinterest has many cofounders – four now – and it has gone through two CEOs.

But if there is a "Mark Zuckerberg" or "Steve Jobs" of Pinterest it's Ben Silbermann.

People close to the company now say that the main reason Sciarra, and not Silbermann, was Cold Brew Labs' first CEO, was because Sciarra was in New York the day someone from Cold Brew Labs had to sign papers to receive the company's first investment.

But sources close to the startup's investors uniformly describe Silbermann as the company's product visionary from the start, and business leader for most of the past year.

He has the right demeanor for the job. One of Pinterest's investors says how Silbermann interacts with other people is reminiscent of Google's Larry Page and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.

Then, during his junior year, he decided to get into business. Clueless where to start, he became a consultant at the Corporate Executive Board in DC. He made a lot of spreadsheets.

He got put in the firm's IT group because that's where there were openings. He found himself reading TechCrunch.

"I remember I had this feeling that this was the story of my time and I was in the wrong place," Silbermann said at ALT. The movie "Pirates Of Silicon Valley," about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, inspired him to move west. One line got him in particular: "There might be something going on in California."

So to California he went.

He didn't start Cold Brew Labs right away. First there was a job at Google.

While at Google, he took some classes at Y-Combinator, the famous incubator for Silicon Valley startups that spawned hits like Airbnb, Instagram, and DropBox.

At Google, Silbermann says he got frustrated because Google wouldn't let him build products. He complained a lot. Finally his girlfriend – the same one who eventually came up with the name Pinterest – said: stop complaining and just go do it.

So, in 2008, he did. Then came Tote. Then came Pinterest.

Pinterest Takes Off – Sideways

When Cold Brew Labs decided to bench Tote and launch Pinterest in late 2009, the company was not expecting the site "to be one of the top 15 properties on the Web in two years," a source close to investors tells us.

"There wasn't any grand vision."

This is good, because when Silbermann and Sciarra showed off Pinterest to their friends and family at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, their friends and family responded with a resounding: "Huh?"

"No one got it," says Silbermann.

Not many people did for the first months of 2010.

Pinterest was not allowed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010

More people were using the site every day, but adoption remained so limited that when TechCrunch hosted its Disrupt conference in New York from May 24 to May 26, team Pinterest found itself in a booth nowhere near the main stage startup competition. It didn't even get the booth on its own merits; First Mark Capital was a Disrupt sponsor, and it had to pull strings.

Then, over Memorial Day, Silbermann and his team got a very strong signal that their product was resonating. Unsolicited, former IAC M&A boss Shana Fisher called the company and said that she loved its product, and wanted to invest if they would let her.

A source close to the company's board says, "It wasn't like the company was going to run out of money if she didn't save it, but she said, 'Here's why I love it and why I think it's important and here are the relationships I could bring to the table,' and I think that all resonated with Ben and Paul."

Pinterest, as the company now called itself, completed a second round of funding. Importantly, Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz joined the round as an angel investor. Hartz is a PayPal veteran, and his involvement exposed Pinterest to one of the Valley's most powerful investor networks.

As 2010 ended, Pinterest looked very healthy – having grown, on average, 50 percent per month.

Says a Pinterest investor about the site's growth during 2010: "It looks flat when you look at the curve now, but if you rescale it and take it back to that point, you start to see people using it and liking it. Even as an individual engaged with the site, you started to see that work."